Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

revolutionary war

First off , when you say that we can go back as far as we like, i immediately thought of a period of time when there was no electricity or cars, around 1793, when yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia. The novel, Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson is one of my favorite pieces of writing, even though it is a children's book. so then this reminded me of the revolutionary war when an entire country's future and independence was at stake , and nothing was clear or certain. I'm sure people were unsure of how they were going to be rule or punished, if they had lost the battles.
In recent years, a great time of uncertainty was in 1989, in Russia. This period was called the revolution of 1989 and was a time when the Soviet Union encountered its downfall. It marked the end of the cold war, and also a time of great change in many different cultures. During the regime of the Soviet union, every inhabitant of a Slavic country was forced to learn to speak Russian. After 1989 the soviet union separated into distinctive countries and each was able to regain the use of its native language. For many this was a time when people were unsure of how to act, because society was no longer communistic, for the most part. To this day, immigrants who had lived through part of the Soviet union control, know how to speak both their native language and Russian.

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